The benchmarks today are comparing clean installations of Fedora 19 x86_64 to the near-final packages of Fedora 20 x86_64. The key information for those evaluating Fedora 20 for Linux performance reasons is that the new release has the Linux 3.11 kernel and (if open-source graphics drivers are important to you) Mesa 9.2.3. Fedora 19 had shipped with Linux 3.9 and Mesa 9.2.0-devel, but kernel upgrades to F19 are also available for bumping the system to Linux 3.11. Both Fedora 19 and 20 are using the GCC 4.8.2 compiler since GCC 4.9 isn't being released until sometime in H1'2014.

It's a bit unfortunate that Fedora 20 didn't opt for shipping Mesa 10.0 (or some -devel snapshot as is usually common). There's many improvements to find with Mesa 10.0. Fedora 20 is also shipping with X.Org Server 1.14.4 over some X.Org Server 1.15 snapshot ahead of its official release before the end of December. Finally yet importantly, Fedora 20 is not shipping with Linux 3.12 that's been stable for a while but it can be found as a stable release update.